Dusk

It’s dusk at five o’clock. The sun is down, but the sky is not yet dark. My train passes a cemetery, a long expanse of graves quiet in the almost night. The graveyard slopes up and away from the train tracks, and the sun has set behind that rise. The trees and bushes among the graves, skeletal in their winter undress, are silhouetted black against the dim grayish blue sky, and as the train moves, they move too. But because of the distance between the tracks and the top of the hill, the near trees appear to be moving faster than the ones in the background – a layered monochromatic beauty unspooling in front of me.